The recent surge of movies based on fairy tales was, regrettably, inevitable as studios continue scouring untraditional mediums for movie ideas (e.g. Battleship) and the Shrek franchise continued to do good business at the box office.
We’ve already had one Snow White movie this year – Tarsem Singh’s (Immortals) regrettable Mirror Mirror – so now it’s time for the edgy reinterpretation. Snow White and the Huntsman takes the next logical step in storytelling devolution and turns Snow White into a Lord of the Rings rip-off.
Yet, somehow, this fantastically cynical production ends up better than it has any right to be. The movie is, largely, a triumph. It’s a handsomely shot film with astonishingly well-designed visuals and mostly competent storytelling chops to boot.
This take on Snow White casts the princess as the legitimate heir to the kingdom being ruled by the Evil Queen’s (Charlize Theron, Young Adult) dark army of magical bullshit. Snow White (Kristen Stewart, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1) is prophesized to be the one who will defeat the evil usurper, and she spends most of the movie on a fantastical, gritty quest to gather an army and slay the wicked queen.
The titular Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth, The Avengers) enters the equation as a charmingly drunken, criminally underwritten tough guy who guides the princess through the dark forest, going through the requisite Snow White story arc along the way.
That blind devotion to a preexisting narrative is the movie’s biggest flaw. The script feels an odd, compulsive need to actually go through the motions of telling the fairy-tale version of Snow White, to the detriment of its own original story.
Snow White, the character, is an insipid, boring bastion of innocence and naiveté in the fairy tale, but winds up asleep half the time to make up for it. In this take, Snow White is still as bland as she ever was in this story, but winds up bearing the most responsibility for driving the plot.
The Huntsman suffers from a lack of personality as well. We’re given the sketchiest, thinnest character backstory ever, but the movie pretty much gives the character free reign to do whatever.
This unbalanaces the narrative. The Evil Queen, strangely, gets the most characterization and winds up being the most entertaining, if not sympathetic, character in the whole movie.
Theron really shines here with the semi-cheesy subject matter, clearly relishing the opportunity to play a supreme bitch. That’s not to say the other performances are bad, but they’re just not in the same league as Theron’s.
Fortunately, the rest of the movie and the grand sweep of the narrative largely cover up the flawed writing. First-time director Rupert Sanders does an impressive job staging engaging action set pieces, imbuing large battles with a sense of chaos and fluid action.
The set designs, however, are the film’s real stars. Snow White and the Huntsman offers, perhaps, the most gorgeous evocation of medieval Europe ever rendered on film. The practical sets seamlessly combine with top notch VFX work to create an expansive and imaginative world.
The visual feast offered by Snow White and the Huntsman largely makes up for the script’s flaws. The film’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a largely entertaining romp that’s leagues ahead of most summer blockbusters.
chzhang@umdbk.com
